It sounds quite ambitious with current technology of drones but if successful could really change the landscape of public events. I wonder how long it would be before the NFL banned them from selling merchandise at games.
I worked in catering and behind the scenes for large events in some big stadiums. A huge part of stadiums and venues is devoted to storage for inventory of things: food, beverage, apparel, merchandise, cleaning supplies, toilet paper, and so on.
When a big game or event occurs, you need to have tens of thousands of t-shirts, thousands of rolls of toilet paper, thousands of hotdogs, hundreds of kegs, and more.
The logistics, manpower, and square footage behind the delivery, storage, and receipt of these goods is no small thing.
Rather than knowing you're going to want 45,000 T-Shirts on Sunday and ordering, receiving, handling, and storing that inventory ahead of time, the AFC would simply move into place at an appropriate time and delivery would be able to occur as soon as the AFC arrived.
You wouldn't need to store hundreds of thousands of "things," as the day before the event, you would be able to have the AFC parked at your location, with the inventory that would've otherwise been shipped to you and stored onsite, and you can simply unload to the appropriate points of usage or sale.
It would be akin to simply unloading it from the "truck" and putting it where it needs to be used for the day or the next day. This is what occurs for smaller events and at smaller venues and having a massive "truck" to unload from, with automated unloaders, would be quite an interesting evolution to this large scale problem.
Keep in mind this is helping out for events that are already planned that have a well understood set of needs. The possibilities for events that are not planned, like disaster relief, or humanitarian aid, would also be very interesting applications.
"Floating warehouse" not just "floating store."
That's probably grouchy of me; I am a regular user of Amazon Prime. But there probably is some limit to instant wish fulfillment especially to the degree it makes the environment less pleasant for everyone.
It does sound pretty awesome - but after the novelty wears off, is this a viable business?
If you're going to a tailgate party, chances are you're going to bring the food with you - after all, Amazon is going to have to charge some additional delivery fee vs. you just picking things up at your local store.
The cost of a blimp to have a refrigeration system onboard, the cost of carrying brats around just in case someone orders them, plus the cost of the drone to make a special trip down to you all adds cost on top of the base food item price.
That doesn't even take into account the cost to Amazon to purchase the brats in the first place, and have them shipped/trucked to their facilities before loading onto this blimp. The grocery store pays this same acquisition fee, and pays for storage, but that's about it.
Right now, you even have to pay an additional fee just to use Amazon Fresh - again, because it's the convenience you're paying for.
So, I'd wager, after people use the service a few times for kicks, they'll get tired of paying more for the novelty of a drone delivery to their car in a parking lot... and go back to using regular grocery stores. This drone delivery thing is probably better for last-second/forgotten items - but again, that's the convenience your're paying for.